5 Ways to Rock Customer Review Sites

There’s been a fair amount of coverage recently about the ins and outs, good and evil, usefulness and rudeness of customer rating and reviews sites. No matter how you feel about these social recommendation sites, if you own a small business of any kind, it’s time to get serious about figuring out and playing the game.

Customer review sites are basically local directories that allow users to add and express their opinions about the various businesses in the directory. Visitors to the site can conduct a search for a plumber in San Diego and get listings along with ratings and reviews from customers of that business.

There are other directories popping up to serve vertical markets such as FriendsEat for restaurants and MyDocHub for physicians and you might also be on the lookout for directories that serve your city only.

A great deal of the grumbling about these sites revolves around two things 1) businesses don’t like to read that they have bad service 2) people who want to game the system or cause some harm to a business have used these tools to do so. Again, no matter, because these tools are here to stay and making their way into the mainstream of search. Google aggregates reviews from many sites and puts them in search results on Google Maps and Yelp reviews show up on page one for many Google local related searches – so, all this to say, let’s see what we can do to use these sites for good!

Below are five ways to benefit from customer review sites

1) List, claim, and build – The first step is to take the time to create accounts with all of the sites listed above, make sure you are listed (others can add your business so don’t be surprised to find a listing), go through the process to claim and take control of your listing and then look at this listing and profile as a brand asset and take the time to complete it fully – think of it like a brochure – add photos, links, brands, products and anything else that helps describe your business.

2) Use it to make you better – If you find a bad review or two, and you might as negative people tend to be more motivated, don’t freak out and start crying foul and spattering hate down on the reviewer. Look at the review and see if there’s something you can add to further explain what went wrong and if the review is clearly off base or possibly an attack from a competitor (it happens) review the policy for resolving these kinds of issues and take some action. However, some bad reviews are a legitimate reflection of the experience your customers are receiving. Step back and ask yourself if this bad review might be a gift in disguise and dig into the core of your business to see if there really is something that needs fixing. (How many dissatisfied customers just go away without a review?) Use reviews, good and bad to help you get better!

3) Monitor profiles – Tracking brand mentions and managing your online reputation go hand in hand with marketing in this social web world. You should set-up alerts that allow you to easily monitor when a new reviews hits one of these sites. You’ll want to know about any and all reviews so you can reach out and engage a customer that expresses a negative opinion and so that you can reach out and thank a customer that had a great experience. In fact, one part of monitoring is so that you can grab these great reviews and add them to your other marketing efforts. The easiest way to stay on top of the reviews is to grab the RSS feed for your profile and set it up as a Google Alert – then you will get notices when something changes. You can also bookmark all your profiles and scroll through the list each week.

4) Get proactive – What’s that saying, the best defense is a good offense – one way to combat any potential negative is to overwhelm it with positive reviews. In addition, sites like Google Maps seem to be giving higher rankings to local listings with more reviews. So, now’s the time start going after reviews from happy customers in a proactive way. Most of the review sites ban the practice of paying for reviews but there’s certainly nothing to stop you from showing customers that give you compliments, refer others, and keep coming back how to write a review on a review site. You can print up a little tutorial, place positive reviews in the window, mention reviews on your web site and in your newsletter and shower lots of appreciation on those that take the time to write a review. Get creative and I’ll be you can create dozens of positive ratings for your profiles.

5) Consider advertising – In most cases these review sites live on ad revenue and have created some special privileges for businesses that advertise. I have heard some great results from some businesses using premium services and some not so great from an ROI standpoint. What you need to analyze and test is whether the premium listing, for example Yelp! allows you to pick your best review and run it in the listing that can appear right next to your competitors, is worth it from an overall branding and lead generation stand point.

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And whatever you do, please don't write a glowing review for your own business. It's amazingly easy to tell it's the business owner and makes the business look even worse.

http://www.metropoliscreative.com Michael Flint

Many companies don't even spend the time to create a decent profile on these sites. You can upload a few photos, add a “special offer”, and link back to your website. Easy – and makes a big difference.

http://righteousmarketing.com/ Robert Brady

Relating to #2, look at what Domino's is doing right now with their advertising. They show actual footage of customer focus groups bashing their pizza. They then talk about how they retooled the recipe and even deliver the new pizza to the same focus group members to show a positive reception. Negative reviews, if you learn from them, can be a boon for your business.

turcott

John -

Great post and something every SMB should be looking at these days. As an extension of tip #3 and managing your online reputation, SMBs should also take into consideration the trend of social media and how it is becoming a bigger part of the world of customer reviews. Reviews (both good & bad) can propagate on the web very quickly. It's important that SMBs proactively ask for feedback, listen to what customers are saying and attempt to stop negative customer reviews before they are posted online.

RatePoint encourages SMBs to proactively ask for feedback, authenticate reviews and respond to and resolve negative postings through our unique dispute resolution system. Social sharing features allow SMBs to share customer reviews with Twitter and Facebook and proactively promote great news about their company.

RatePoint has made available a free e-book called “The Small-­Business Owner’s Guide to Building a Great Reputation: http://bit.ly/dmCT23

Great tips and practical advice for small business owners to follow. Many of whom get caught unaware of the opportunity to be proactive and have a plan to build and manage their reputation – until a negative review comes to their attention.

Listing on a Customer Review Site, may at times do more harm than good in case of negative reviews – For you are not aware of who is reviewing your product. When the negative comments are completely baseless, it will affect the next visitors reading that review..I feel there is scope for your competitors to manipulate the content and the image of your brand..

http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog ducttape

All the more reason to get in there and help your happy customers post positive reviews

http://www.binbin.net/ Barbie Brown

Because there are probably more than five web companies left that haven't been eyed for acquisition, Google is reportedly in talks to acquire Yelp, the local review site that has a big web and mobile presence. If it goes through for anywhere close to a rumored $500 million, Google will have spent $1.5 billion on acquisitions since August, or roughly the same it spent on YouTube three years ago.